the_snooze

A lot of consumer tech needs have been met for decades. The problem is that companies aren't able to extract rent from all that value.

Microsoft is staffed by highly educated adults. They have agency to do better and actually serve their paying customers well. They choose not to.

A lot of digital tech produces more waste than actual value. Just look at your email inbox: odds are, the overwhelming majority of emails you get aren't useful correspondence from real people.

The level of entitlement and irresponsibility tech companies (especially the largest and most well-resourced ones) is just astounding. You'd think that proper engineering requires some degree of care and stewardship, but these aren't engineering organizations, they're toddlers.

>One evil thing they were doing that they've suddenly given up on: they spent a ton of money buying up gaming studios (highly anti-competitively) to win on the console front and to stymie Steam's ability to move off Windows. They wanted to make Windows/Xbox gaming the place everyone would be. They threw all of that away because AI became a bigger target.

No kidding, the totally threw it all away. It used to be that Windows was already the place for gaming. And the Xbox 360 arguably won its generation. But that was a long time ago. Has any Microsoft gaming release exceeded expectations lately? Call of Duty will always sell like hotcakes, but the latest Black Ops is a hot expensive mess that underperformed last year's title.

Original MegaLag video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGT_CKGgFE

You'd think that if you were an engineer building and maintaing a system like this, you'd have an "are we the baddies?" moment, but guess not.

Yeah, I feel like our form of representative democracy is the least bad option. At the very least, office-holders aren't entitled to their office beyond their term unless they're re-elected.

The fundamental problem is that governing is boring, complicated, and unfulfilling to most people. The most impactful elections to citizens' day-to-day lives (i.e., local offices, state legislatures, and primaries for those) have absolutely abysmal participation rates, even in states that bend over backwards with voter accessibility.

There are different degrees of "exposed to the internet." You don't need to make your self-hosted services fully accessible by anyone from everywhere. VPN, IP whitelists, mTLS, HTTP basic auth, etc. change the calculus of security and feature updates. You can afford to lag a bit behind on updates because you're not running critical enterprise infrastructure at scale.

Maybe I'm missing something here: the great thing about self-hosting is that you choose if and when you update your back-end software. What's stopping self-hosting admins from simply staying on a known good version and forking that if they so desire?

When your computer does what you tell it and it doesn't actively try to undermine your intentions, computing becomes fun again.

I'd argue it's more than "just inertia." It's that end-users don't have any real meaningful choice. If you deviate from the standard in your field (MS Office in my case), you take on immense costs for minimal gain.

Microsoft knows this, and they make business decisions to maintain and expand this position. They may not be a monopoly in the strict sense (and I never said they were), but they're not a passive player either who accidentally fell into this situation. We don't need to give trillion-dollar companies the benefit of the doubt here.

I never said it was Microsoft's problem. I'm just showing you that "oh, switch to something else" is a naive view if you actually have real work to do.

That's an incomplete view. Office is a strong incumbent not because it's a good product, but because there's decades of processes built around it. To take a small slice from my world, if you do any kind of government-funded research, you must use Microsoft Office because government funding agencies have in-house templates for budgets and technical reports. They'll reject proposals and contractually-obligated deliveries if you don't use their template. Those templates break in spectacular and unpredictable ways on non-MS-Office suites.

People use MS Office because other people use MS Office. It's network effects.

The most reliable way you get ahead is boring: small levels of effort, done consistently over time. You don't notice the progress day-to-day. You don't get much to brag about on social media. But it adds up.

>And yet here we are, able to talk to a computer, that writes Pytorch code that orchestrates the complexity below it.

It writes something that that's almost, but not quite entirely unlike Pytorch. You're putting a little too much value on a simulacrum of a programmer.

I think it boils down to knowing what your values are. If you're constantly saying "no" to your team or organization (or vice versa), then that's a sign of a values misalignment. At that point, your options are to push to change your environment's values, realize your values aren't actually what you think they are, or leave.

It's toddler-level thinking. Replace the complexity of leadership, humanity, and values with "make line go up," because the latter is way easier to measure, especially when you ignore the costs that aren't yours.

Parking apps don’t seem to care much for that. They know you’ll jump through their shoddy UIs and data collection because they have a local monopoly. Often with physical payment kiosks removed and replaced with “download our shitty app!” notices.

Eh, it's way simpler than that. AI doesn't know when to STFU. When I write an email or document, I don't need modern-day Clippy constantly guessing (and second-guessing) my thoughts. I don't need an AI sparkle button plastered everywhere to summarize articles for me. It's infantilizing and reeks of desperation. If AI is a truly useful tool, then I'll integrate it into my workflow on my own terms and my own timeline.

For anyone still in school, networking is easy for students who take initiative. This doesn't mean going to networking events. It means actually doing things with actual people: get involved in undergraduate research, sports, arts, Greek life, volunteering, on-campus part-time jobs, etc. Universities have those low-barrier low-risk things going on that you can just try out. Students who do this get the inside track on opportunities that aren't broadly advertised, so they face far less competition and are likely better fits for those opportunities due to the experience they got by being involved.

I think the utility of voice commands is marginal at best in a car. In isolation, voice commands don't make sense if you have passengers. You basically have to tell everyone to shut up to ensure the car understands your commands over any ongoing conversation. And in the context of old fashioned knobs and buttons, voice is seriously a lot of complex engineering to solve problems that have long been non-issues.

Not to mention the likely need for continuous internet connectivity and service upkeep. Car companies aren't exactly known for good software governance.

Alexa is in the same boat. Compared to old-fashioned finger-and-screen interfaces, maybe voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case. It's inconvenient, unreliable, and even if it works quite slow. Yet you see companies continue to chase the dream in the current generative AI craze.

I get the sci-fi "wow" appeal, but even the folks who tried to build Minority Report-style 3D interfaces gave up after realizing tired arms make for annoyed users.

It basically boils down to "I want the external validation of being seen as a good writer, without any of the internal growth and struggle needed to get there."

Ad SDKs exploit OS bugs to get location data. These specific ones have since been patched, but historicaly they read ARP tables, EXIF geo tags, and colluded with other apps that legimately had location permissions to get that info. It wouldn't surprise me if there are other live exploits quietly being used today. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity19/presentat...

You see this in public libraries in major cities. They're open to everyone, so they become shelters of last resort for homeless folks. The large presence of homeless people discourages the public at-large from using the library as a library. That in turn weakens the political will to continue funding libraries.

They will go out of business, in the long-term. What PE does is hot potato: they "trim the fat" off an existing business to goose up margins in the short-term, unload it to someone else, and that someone else is stuck with a business that's unsustainable long-term because that "fat" was actually resilience.

Sometimes, these buyouts are leveraged, with the company itself taking on the debt the PE firm used to buy it, so the PE's own risk is minimal.

> Apple's extreme of restricting the installation of anything outside of the App Store... is a step too far.

This is the key for me right here. I think it's fine to offer preferred services and distribution platforms on a piece of hardware. But actively preventing other software from running on that hardware is silly. The user really doesn't own the thing at that point.

Contrast Apple's treatment of iPhones and iPads with Valve's position on the upcoming Steam Machine:

>Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?

>In other circumstances, they make avoidable mistakes, such as deploying confusing user interfaces or choosing greed over customer delight.

This is exactly what got me to stop using Spotify (for their insistence on spamming podcasts on the home screen, when I'm there solely for music) and music streaming as a whole (for my playlists randomly losing songs). Buying the audio files and maintaining them on my own hardware is less BS.

>For example, if you ask ChatGPT’s Agent to book a travel, it’ll open Chromium on Linux in an Azure container, search the query, visit different websites, navigate each page and book a flight ticket using your saved credentials. An AI Agent tries to mimic a human, and it can perform tasks on your behalf while you sit back and relax.

Big tech has repeatedly shown that they are not good stewards of end users' privacy and agency. You'd have to have been born yesterday to believe they'd build AI systems that truly serve the user's best interests like this.

Windows has strong engineering bones, but the business cancer has long spread throughout. Microsoft has been ratcheting up the extractive practices and disrespecting user agency since at least Windows 11's release in 2021. It's a lost cause as far as I'm concerned.